Multi-column

Blindsight

Thoughts

Ok this book blew my mind. There’s something haunting and soul crushing about it.

Highlights

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If we’re not in pain, we’re not alive.

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Blindsight’s contention is that this life form is better adapted to survival than Humanity in all imaginable ways, because it is not handicapped with this thing we call consciousness.

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In Blindsight, Peter gives us a universe that is capricious, agencyless, and coldly mechanical. He takes a rigorously behaviorist stance on Human neurology. His people are ticking clockworks—beautiful, strong, wounded, heroic ticking clockworks, with that perception familiar to so many of us of being trapped outside the course of our lives—observing, perhaps impeding, but not in control.

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Horrible things happen for no reason, because the universe is like that, and Watts doesn’t give us the pretense of some higher meaning as a comfort.

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In its own way, though, that nihilism itself can be comforting, and this is another place where I quibble. If it’s all futile, we’re excused from trying. And not trying is so much easier than trying-and-failing. It’s soothing to have an excuse for hopelessness. And we do have a cultural bias toward believing that the most cynical response to any situation is the wisest and most knowledgable one.

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This thematic freight—that all we see when we look out at the universe is our own selves reflected, because that is what we are programmed to see, and that our conscious minds may very well be holding us back and slowing us down (and making us miserable in the deal), and that we are all just part of the machine—

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Blindsight is one of those rare books that alters the reader’s perception of the world and of himself, if the reader is brave enough to tackle it head-on. The idea that consciousness is self-destructive is a heady one.

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The grown-ups showed up eventually, of course. Medicine was bestowed, ambulances called. Parents were outraged, diplomatic volleys exchanged, but it’s tough to drum up neighborhood outrage on behalf of your injured baby when playground surveillance from three angles shows the little darling—and five of his buddies—kicking in the ribs of a disabled boy. My mother, for her part, recycled the usual complaints about problem children and absentee fathers—Dad was off again in some other hemisphere—but the dust settled pretty quickly. Pag and I even stayed friends, after a short hiatus that reminded us both of the limited social prospects open to schoolyard rejects who don’t stick together.

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The killing of a hundred would leave no more stain on Sarasti’s surfaces than the swatting of an insect; guilt beaded and rolled off this creature like water on wax.

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WHEN IT IS DARK ENOUGH, YOU CAN SEE THE STARS. —Ralph Waldo Emerson

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They clenched around the world like a fist, each black as the inside of an event horizon until those last bright moments when they all burned together. They screamed as they died. Every radio up to geostat groaned in unison, every infrared telescope went briefly snowblind. Ashes stained the sky for weeks afterward; mesospheric clouds, high above the jet stream, turned to glowing rust with every sunrise. The objects, apparently, consisted largely of iron. Nobody ever knew what to make of that. For perhaps the first time in history, the world knew before being told: If you’d seen the sky, you had the scoop. The usual arbiters of newsworthiness, stripped of their accustomed role in filtering reality, had to be content with merely labeling it. It took them ninety minutes to agree on Fireflies. A half hour after that, the first Fourier transforms appeared in the noosphere; to no one’s great surprise, the Fireflies had not wasted their dying breaths on static. There was pattern embedded in that terminal chorus, some cryptic intelligence that resisted all earthly analysis. The experts, rigorously empirical, refused to speculate: They only admitted that the Fireflies had said something. They didn’t know what. Everyone else did. How else would you explain 65,536 probes evenly dispersed along a lat-long grid that barely left any square meter of planetary surface unexposed? Obviously the Flies had taken our picture. The whole world had been caught with its pants down in panoramic composite freeze-frame. We’d been surveyed—whether as a prelude to formal introductions or outright invasion was anyone’s guess.

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But now we were all cavemen again, huddling beneath some overhang while lightning split the heavens and vast formless monsters, barely glimpsed in bright strobe-frozen instants, roared and clashed in the darkness on all sides. There was no comfort in solitude. You couldn’t get it from interactive shadows. You needed someone real at your side, someone to hold on to, someone to share your airspace along with your fear and hope and uncertainty.

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“I love you, son.” Where are you? Are you coming back? “Thanks,” I said again. “That’s good to know.”

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The most altruistic and sustainable philosophies fail before the brute brain stem imperative of self-interest.

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After four thousand years we can’t even prove that reality exists beyond the mind of the first-person dreamer. We have such need of intellects greater than our own. But we’re not very good at building them. The forced matings of minds and electrons succeed and fail with equal spectacle. Our hybrids become as brilliant as savants, and as autistic. We graft people to prosthetics, make their overloaded motor strips juggle meat and machinery, and shake our heads when their fingers twitch and their tongues stutter. Computers bootstrap their own offspring, grow so wise and incomprehensible that their communiquĂ©s assume the hallmarks of dementia: unfocused and irrelevant to the barely intelligent creatures left behind. And when your surpassing creations find the answers you asked for, you can’t understand their analysis and you can’t verify their answers. You have to take their word on faith— —or you use information theory to flatten it for you, to squash the tesseract into two dimensions and the Klein bottle into three, to simplify reality and pray to whatever gods survived the millennium that your honorable twisting of the truth hasn’t ruptured any of its load-bearing pylons. You hire people like me; the crossbred progeny of profilers and proof assistants and information theorists.

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Maybe the Singularity happened years ago. We just don’t want to admit we were left behind.

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So here we were, rehydrated and squeaky clean: Isaac Szpindel, to study the aliens. The Gang of Four—Susan James and her secondary personae—to talk to them. Major Amanda Bates was here to fight, if necessary. And Jukka Sarasti to command us all, to move us like chess pieces on some multidimensional game board that only vampires could see.

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“They trade stealth for speed. By the time you react, they already have what they want.” He spoke quietly, patiently, a well-fed predator explaining the rules of the game to prey that really should know better: The longer it takes me to track you down, the more hope you have of escaping.

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So I pretended for a moment, assessing the woman in the corner booth: gangly and glorious, a half-dozen ethnicities coexisting peacefully with no single voice dominant. Something glowed on her cheek, a faint emerald staccato against the ambient red shift. Her hair floated in a diffuse ebony cloud about her head. As I neared I caught occasional glints of metal within that nimbus, the threads of a static generator purveying the illusion of weightlessness. In normal light her blood-red skin would doubtless shift down to the fashionable butterscotch of the unrepentant mongrel.

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You’d be surprised how much rewiring can be done noninvasively. You can start all sorts of cascades just by playing certain sounds in the right order, or showing images with the right balance of geometry and emotion.” “I assume those are new techniques.” “Not really. Rhythm and music hang their hats on the same basic principle. We just turned art into science.”

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LEADERS ARE VISIONARIES WITH A POORLY DEVELOPED SENSE OF FEAR AND NO CONCEPT OF THE ODDS AGAINST THEM. —Robert Jarvik

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Technology implies belligerence, they said. I suppose I should explain that, now that it’s completely irrelevant. You’ve probably forgotten after all this time. Once there were three tribes. The Optimists, whose patron saints were Drake and Sagan, believed in a universe crawling with gentle intelligence—spiritual brethren vaster and more enlightened than we, a great galactic siblinghood into whose ranks we would someday ascend. Surely, said the Optimists, space travel implies enlightenment, for it requires the control of great destructive energies. Any race that can’t rise above its own brutal instincts will wipe itself out long before it learns to bridge the interstellar gulf. Across from the Optimists sat the Pessimists, who genuflected before graven images of St. Fermi and a host of lesser lightweights. The Pessimists envisioned a lonely universe full of dead rocks and prokaryotic slime. The odds are just too low, they insisted. Too many rogues, too much radiation, too much eccentricity in too many orbits. It is a surpassing miracle that even one Earth exists; to hope for many is to abandon reason and embrace religious mania. After all, the universe is fourteen billion years old: If the galaxy were alive with intelligence, wouldn’t it be here by now? Equidistant to the other two tribes sat the Historians. They didn’t have too many thoughts on the probable prevalence of intelligent, spacefaring extraterrestrials, but if there are any, they said, they’re not just going to be smart. They’re going to be mean. It might seem almost too obvious a conclusion. What is Human history, if not an ongoing succession of greater technologies grinding lesser ones beneath their boots? But the subject wasn’t merely Human history, or the unfair advantage that tools gave to any given side; the oppressed snatch up advanced weaponry as readily as the oppressor, given half a chance. No, the real issue was how those tools got there in the first place. The real issue was what tools are for. To the Historians, tools existed for only one reason: to force the universe into unnatural shapes. They treated nature as an enemy, they were by definition a rebellion against the way things were. Technology is a stunted thing in benign environments, it never thrived in any culture gripped by belief in natural harmony. Why invent fusion reactors if your climate is comfortable, if your food is abundant? Why build fortresses if you have no enemies? Why force change upon a world that poses no threat?

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And if the best toys do end up in the hands of those who’ve never forgotten that life itself is an act of war against intelligent opponents, what does that say about a race whose machines travel between the stars?

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And so, inevitably, a fourth tribe arose, a Heavenly host that triumphed over all: the Tribe That Just Didn’t Give a Shit. They didn’t know what to do when the Fireflies showed up.

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I shrugged. No point making a big thing out of it. “Well, according to game theory, you should never tell anyone when your birthday is.” “I don’t follow.” “It’s a lose-lose proposition. There’s no winning strategy.” “What do you mean, strategy? It’s a birthday.” Chelsea had said exactly the same thing when I’d tried to explain it to her. Look, I’d said, say you tell everyone when it is and nothing happens. It’s kind of a slap in the face. Or suppose they throw you a party, Chelsea had replied. Then you don’t know whether they’re doing it sincerely, or if your earlier interaction just guilted them into observing an occasion they’d rather have ignored. But if you don’t tell anyone, and nobody commemorates the event, there’s no reason to feel badly because after all, nobody knew. And if someone does buy you a drink then you know it’s sincere because nobody would go to all the trouble of finding out when your birthday is—and then celebrating it—if they didn’t honestly like you.

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Mom would never admit it in a million years but you had a point about language. When you get right down to it, it’s a work-around. Like trying to describe dreams with smoke signals. It’s noble, it’s maybe the most noble thing a body can do but you can’t turn a sunset into a string of grunts without losing something. It’s limiting. Maybe whatever’s out here doesn’t even use it.”

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THE GLASS CEILING IS IN YOU. THE GLASS CEILING IS CONSCIENCE. —Jacob Holtzbrinck, The Keys to the Planet

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She grabbed the nearest chair, sat, raised her hands as if cueing an orchestra. Her fingers trembled in midair as she played virtual icons; her lips and jaw twitched with subvocal commands. I tapped her feed and saw text accreting around the alien signal: RORSCHACH TO VESSEL APPROACHING 116°AZ–23°DEC REL. HELLO THESEUS. RORSCHACH TO VESSEL APPROACHING 116°AZ–23°DEC REL. HELLO THESEUS. RORSCHACH TO VESSEL APPROACHI 
 She’d decoded the damn thing. Already. She was even answering it: Theseus to Rorschach. Hello Rorschach. HELLO THESEUS. WELCOME TO THE NEIGHBORHOOD. She’d had less than three minutes. Or rather, they’d had less than three minutes: four fully-conscious hub personalities and a few dozen unconscious semiotic modules, all working in parallel, all exquisitely carved from the same lump of gray matter. I could almost see why someone would do such deliberate violence to their own minds, if it resulted in this kind of performance.

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“Empathy for sociopaths isn’t common,” I remarked. “Maybe it should be. We, at least”—he waved an arm; some remote-linked sensor cluster across the simulator whirred and torqued reflexively—“chose the add-ons. Vampires had to be sociopaths. They’re too much like their own prey—a lot of taxonomists don’t even consider them a subspecies, you know that? Never diverged far enough for reproductive isolation. So maybe they’re more syndrome than race. Just a bunch of obligate cannibals with a consistent set of deformities.” “And how does that make—” “If the only thing you can eat is your own kind, empathy is gonna be the first thing that goes. Psychopathy’s no disorder in those shoes, eh? Just a survival strategy. But they still make our skin crawl, so we—chain ’em up.”

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THEY KNOW THE WORDS BUT NOT THE MUSIC. —Robert Hare, Without Conscience

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Rorschach massed 1.8 ‱ 1010 kilograms within a total volume of 2.3 ‱ 108 cubic meters. Its magnetic field, judging by radio squeals and its Plage effect, was thousands of times stronger than the sun’s. Astonishingly, parts of the composite image were clear enough to discern fine spiral grooves twined around the structure. (“Fibonacci sequence,” Szpindel reported, one jiggling eye fixing me for a moment. “At least they’re not completely alien.”) Spheroid protuberances disfigured the tips of at least three of Rorschach’s innumerable spines; the grooves were more widely spaced in those areas, like skin grown tight and swollen with infection. Just before one vital mirror sailed out of range it glimpsed another spine, split a third of the way along its length. Torn material floated flaccid and unmoving in vacuum. “Please,” Bates said softly. “Tell me that’s not what it looks like.” Szpindel grinned. “Sporangium? Seedpod? Why not?” Rorschach may have been reproducing but beyond a doubt it was growing, fed by a steady trickle of infalling debris from Ben’s accretion belt. We were close enough now to get a clear view of that procession: rocks and mountains and pebbles fell like sediment swirling around a drain. Particles that collided with the artifact simply stuck; Rorschach engulfed prey like some vast metastatic amoeba. The acquired mass was apparently processed internally and shunted to apical growth zones; judging by infinitesimal changes in the artifact’s allometry, it grew from the tips of its branches. The procession never stopped. Rorschach was insatiable. It was a strange attractor in the interstellar gulf; the paths along which the rocks fell were precisely and utterly chaotic. It was as though some Keplerian black belt had set up the whole system like an astronomical windup toy, kicked everything into motion, and let inertia do the rest.

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Subtle motion drew my eye. Sarasti was back, floating above the bright topography on the table. The light show squirmed across his visor as he moved his head. I could feel his eyes behind it. And something else, behind him. I couldn’t tell what it was. I could point to nothing but a vague sense of something out of place, somewhere in the background. Something over on the far side of the drum wasn’t quite right. No, that wasn’t it; something nearer, something amiss somewhere along the drum’s axis. But there was nothing there, nothing I could see—just the naked pipes and conduits of the spinal bundle, threading through empty space, and— And suddenly, whatever had been wrong was right again. That was what finally locked my focus: the evaporation of some anomaly, a reversion to normalcy that caught my eye like a flicker of motion. I could see the exact spot along the bundle where the change had occured. There was nothing out of place there now—but there had been. It was in my head, barely subliminal, an itch so close to the surface that I knew I could bring it back if I just concentrated.

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That was crazy. There was nothing there. We were half a light-year from home, talking to unseen aliens about family reunions, and my eyes were playing tricks on me. Have to talk to Szpindel about that, if it happened again.

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“Yeah, but how can you translate something if you don’t understand it?” A common cry, outside the field. People simply can’t accept that patterns carry their own intelligence, quite apart from the semantic content that clings to their surfaces; if you manipulate the topology correctly, that content just comes along for the ride.

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the Chinese Room?”

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It’s risky, getting involved. Too many confounds. Every tool in the shed goes dull and rusty the moment you get entangled with the system you’re observing. Still serviceable in a pinch, though.

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A holographic inset beside the main display plotted the points of a triangle in flux: Theseus at the apex, Rorschach and Jack defining the narrow base. “Rorschach to Theseus. I seeee you
” “She’s got a more casual affect than he ever did.” Sascha glanced up at Sarasti, and did not add You sure about this? She was starting to wonder herself, though. Starting to dwell on the potential consequences of being wrong, now that we were committed. As far as sober second thought was concerned it was too little too late; but for Sascha, that was progress. Besides, it had been Sarasti’s decision.

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Imagine a crown of thorns, twisted, dark and unreflective, grown too thickly tangled to ever rest on any Human head. Put it in orbit around a failed star whose own reflected half-light does little more than throw its satellites into silhouette. Occasional bloody highlights glinted like dim embers from its twists and crannies; they only emphasized the darkness everywhere else. Imagine an artifact that embodies the very notion of torture, something so wrenched and disfigured that even across uncounted light-years and unimaginable differences in biology and outlook, you can’t help but feel that somehow, the structure itself is in pain. Now make it the size of a city. It flickered as we watched. Lightning arced from recurved spines a thousand meters long. ConSensus showed us a strobe-lit hellscape, huge and dark and twisted. The composites had lied. It was not the least bit beautiful. “Now it’s too late,” something said from deep inside. “Now every last one of you is dead. And Susan? You there, Susan? “We’re taking you first.”

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LIFE’S TOO SHORT FOR CHESS. —Lord Byron

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“Game theory again. Jesus, Isaac.” “No, listen. You’re thinking about the aliens like they were some kind of mammal. Something that cares, something that looks after its investments.” “How do you know they aren’t?” “Because you can’t protect your kids when they’re light-years away. They’re on their own, and it’s a big cold dangerous universe so most of them aren’t going to make it, eh? The most you can do is crank out millions of kids, take cold comfort in knowing that a few always luck out through random chance. It’s not a mammal mind-set, Meesh. You want an earthbound simile, think of dandelion seeds. Or, or herring.”

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So the best you can do is mix up your strategies based on the odds. It’s a weighted dice roll and it gives you the best mean payoff over the whole game, but you’re bound to crap out and choose the wrong strategy at least some of the time. Price of doing business. And that means—that means—that weak players not only can win against stronger ones, but they’re statistically bound to in some cases.” Michelle snorted. “That’s your game theory? Rock Paper Scissors with statistics?”

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Doesn’t matter how good you are at poker when it comes to the deal, eh? Cards still deal out with the same odds.” “So that’s what we’re playing. Poker.” “Be thankful it’s not chess. We wouldn’t have a hope in hell.”

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I’m just fatalistically cheerful. We all come into the story halfway through, we all catch up as best we can, and we’re all gonna die before it ends.”

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Theseus was birthing a litter, two by two. They were nasty-looking things, armored, squashed egg-shapes, twice the size of a Human torso and studded with gardening implements: antennae, optical ports, retractable threadsaws. Weapons muzzles.

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“Can you think of any reason why something with such different needs would attack us?” “That depends,” she said, “on whether the fact that we are different is reason enough.”

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“Sarasti doesn’t guess,” Bates said. “The man’s in charge for a reason. Doesn’t make much sense to question his orders, given we’re all about a hundred IQ points short of understanding the answer anyway.” “And yet he’s also got that whole predatory side nobody talks about,” I remarked. “It must be difficult for him, all that intellect coexisting with so much instinctive aggression. Making sure the right part wins.”

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She didn’t hate me. What she hated was what my presence implied. They don’t trust us to speak for ourselves, she wouldn’t say. No matter how qualified we are, no matter how far ahead of the pack. Maybe even because of that. We’re contaminated. We’re subjective. So they send Siri Keeton to tell them what we really mean.

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“It’s not about trust, Major. It’s about location. Nobody gets a good view of a system from the inside, no matter who they are. The view’s distorted.” “And yours isn’t.” “I’m outside the system.” “You’re interacting with me now.” “As an observer only. Perfection’s unattainable but it isn’t unapproachable, you know? I don’t play a role in decision making or research, I don’t interfere in any aspect of the mission that I’m assigned to study. But of course I ask questions. The more information I have, the better my analysis.”

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With vampires it was a little different. It wasn’t shortness of breath, or metabolic overdrive, or some blanket of snow that locked the pantry every winter. The problem wasn’t so much a lack of prey as a lack of difference from it; vampires were such a recent split from the ancestral baseline that the reproductive rates hadn’t diverged. This was no woodland-variety lynx-hare dynamic, where prey outnumbered predators a hundred to one. Vampires fed on things that bred barely faster than they did. They would have wiped out their own food supply in no time if they hadn’t learned how to ease off on the throttle. By the time they went extinct they’d learned to shut down for decades. It made two kinds of sense. It not only slashed their metabolic needs while prey bred itself back to harvestable levels, it gave us time to forget that we were prey. We were so smart by the Pleistocene, smart enough for easy skepticism; if you haven’t seen any night-stalking demons in all your years on the savannah, why should you believe some senile campfire ramblings passed down by your mother’s mother? It was murder on our ancestors, even if those same enemy genes—co-opted now—served us so well when we left the sun fifty thousand years later. But it was almost—heartening, I guess—to think that maybe Sarasti felt the tug of other genes, some aversion to prolonged visibility shaped by generations of natural selection. Maybe he spent every moment in our company fighting voices that urged him to Hide, hide, let them forget. Maybe he retreated when they got too loud, maybe we made him as uneasy as he made us. We could always hope.

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Jack stuck out its tongue, a giant mechanical sperm with a myo-optical tail. Its head was a thick-skinned lozenge, at least half ceramic shielding by cross-section; the tiny payload of sensors at its core was rudimentary, but small enough for the whole assembly to thread through the pencil-thin hole the laser had cut. It unspooled down the hole, rimming Rorschach’s newly torn orifice.

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MOTHERS ARE FONDER THAN FATHERS OF THEIR CHILDREN BECAUSE THEY ARE MORE CERTAIN THEY ARE THEIR OWN. —Aristotle

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Because Heaven had a catch. No matter how many constructs and avatars Helen built in there, no matter how many empty vessels sang her praises or commiserated over the injustices she’d suffered, when it came right down to it she was only talking to herself. There were other realities over which she had no control, other people who didn’t play by her rules—and if they thought of Helen at all, they thought as they damn well pleased. She could go the rest of her life without ever meeting any of them. But she knew they were out there, and it drove her crazy. Taking my leave of Heaven, it occurred to me that omnipotent though she was, there was only one way my mother would ever be truly happy in her own personal creation. The rest of creation would have to go.

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THE LORD WILL TAKE CONTROL OF YOU. YOU WILL DANCE AND SHOUT AND BECOME A DIFFERENT PERSON. —1 Samuel 10:6

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Alter carried baggage over a century old, ConSensus told me. Sascha was right; there’d been a time when MCC was MPD, a disorder rather than a complex, and it had never been induced deliberately. According to the experts of that time, multiple personalities arose spontaneously from unimaginable cauldrons of abuse—fragmentary personae offered up to suffer rapes and beatings while the child behind took to some unknowable sanctuary in the folds of the brain. It was both survival strategy and ritual self-sacrifice: powerless souls hacking themselves to pieces, offering up quivering chunks of self in the desperate hope that the vengeful gods called Mom or Dad might not be insatiable. None of it had been real, as it turned out. Or at least, none of it had been confirmed. The experts of the day had been little more than witch doctors dancing through improvised rituals: meandering free-form interviews full of leading questions and nonverbal cues, scavenger hunts through regurgitated childhoods. Sometimes a shot of lithium or haloperidol when the beads and rattles didn’t work. The technology to map minds was barely off the ground; the technology to edit them was years away. So the therapists and psychiatrists poked at their victims and invented names for things they didn’t understand, and argued over the shrines of Freud and Klein and the old Astrologers, doing their very best to sound like practitioners of Science. Inevitably, it was Science that turned them all into roadkill; MPD was a half-forgotten fad even before the advent of synaptic rewiring. But alter was a word from that time, and its resonance had persisted. Among those who remembered the tale, alter was codespeak for betrayal and Human sacrifice. Alter meant cannon fodder.

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As far as Earth was concerned, everyone on Theseus was an alter.

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Even when the walls didn’t move, they did: always at the corner of the eye, that sense of crawling motion. Always at the back of the mind, the sense of being watched, the dread certainty of malign and alien observers just out of sight. More than once I turned, expecting to catch one of those phantoms in the open. All I ever saw was a half-blind grunt floating down the passageway, or a wide-eyed and jittery crewmate returning my stare. And the walls of some glistening black lava tube with a hundred embedded eyes, all snapped shut just the instant before. Our lights pushed the darkness back perhaps twenty meters in either direction; beyond, mist and shadows seethed. And the sounds—Rorschach creaked around us like some ancient wooden hull trapped in pack ice. Electricity hissed like rattlesnakes.

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The wall glistened in my headlamp like wet clay. Satanic runes sparkled in my imagination.

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We stuffed the Gang into the tent. Bates moved aside as I dove in after them. Amazing, the way she held it together. Somehow she kept the demons at bay, herded us to shelter like a border collie in a thunderstorm. She was— She wasn’t following us in. She wasn’t even there. I turned to see her body floating outside the tent, one gloved hand grasping the edge of the flap; but even under all those layers of Kapton and Chromel and polycarbonate, even behind the distorted half-reflections on her faceplate, I could tell that something was missing. All her surfaces had just disappeared. This couldn’t be Amanda Bates. The thing before me had no more topology than a mannequin.

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She could hotwire happiness in the time it took to fix a sandwich, reconcile you with your whole childhood in the course of a lunch hour or three.

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“Let me give you the gift of happiness,” she said. “I’m already pretty happy.” “I’ll make you happier. A TAT, on me.” “Tat?” “Transient Attitudinal Tweak. I’ve still got privileges at Sax.” “I’ve been tweaked plenty. Change one more synapse and I might turn into someone else.” “That’s ridiculous and you know it. Or every experience you had would turn you into a different person.” I thought about that. “Maybe it does.”

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“So we’re fishing for what, exactly? Repressed memories?” “No such thing.” She grinned in toothy reassurance. “There are only memories we choose to ignore, or kinda think around, if you know what I mean.” “I thought this was the gift of happiness. Why—” She laid a fingertip across my lips. “Believe it or not, Cyggers, people sometimes choose to ignore even good memories. Like, say, if they enjoyed something they didn’t think they should. Or”—she kissed my forehead—“if they don’t think they deserve to be happy.” “So we’re going for—” “Potluck. You can never tell till you get a bite. Close your eyes.”

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BondfastTM Formula IV ÎŒ-OPIOID RECEPTOR PROMOTERS/MATERNAL RESPONSE STIMULANT “Strengthening ties between Mother and Child since 2042.”

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“Yeah? And how are you going to stop me, you little geek? You can’t even make the time to find out what’s going on in your own family; you think you can control me all the way from fucking orbit? You think—” Suddenly, nothing came from the living room but soft choking sounds. I peeked around the corner. My father had Helen by the throat. “I think,” he growled, “that I can stop you from doing anything to Siri ever again, if I have to. And I think you know that.” And then she saw me. And then he did. And my father took his hand from around my mother’s neck, and his face was utterly unreadable. But there was no mistaking the triumph on hers.

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She put her arms around me, drew me close. She smelled like sand, and sweat. I loved the way she smelled. For a while, I could feel a little bit safe. For a while I could feel like the bottom wasn’t going to drop out at any moment. Somehow, when I was with Chelsea, I mattered.

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PREDATORS RUN FOR THEIR DINNER. PREY RUN FOR THEIR LIVES. —Old Ecologist’s Proverb

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“You reached for it. You almost caught it. That wasn’t blind chance.” “Not blind chance. Blindsight. Amanda? Respond, please.” “Blindsight?” “Nothing wrong with the receptors,” he said distractedly. “Brain processes the image but it can’t access it. Brain stem takes over.” “Your brain stem can see but you can’t?”

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Something bumped the tent from the outside. Something grabbed the outer catch and pulled. Our shelter opened like an eye. Amanda Bates looked in at us through the exposed membrane. “I’m reading three point eight,” she said. “That’s tolerable, right?” Nobody moved. “Come on, people. Break’s over.”

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By the time we docked with Theseus both Michelle and I were feeling nauseous. (The rest of the Gang, oddly, was not; I had no idea how that was possible.) The others would be presenting the same symptoms within minutes. Without intervention we would all be vomiting our guts out for the following two days. Then the body would pretend to recover; for perhaps a week we would feel no pain and have no future. We would walk and talk and move like any living thing, and perhaps convince ourselves that we were immortal after all. Then we would collapse into ourselves, rotted from the inside out. We would bleed from our eyes and mouths and assholes, and if any god was merciful we would die before splitting open like rotten fruit.

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“That’s it! That’s it!” Susan cried. The triangles had iterated out of existence. Now the display was full of interlocking asymmetrical pentagrams, a spiderweb of fish scales. “Don’t tell us that’s random noise,” she said triumphantly. “No,” Szpindel said, “It’s a KlĂŒver constant.” “A—” “It’s a hallucination, Suze.”

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“Brain’s got all kinds of gauges. You can know you’re blind even when you’re not; you can know you can see, even when you’re blind. And yeah, you can know you don’t exist even when you do. It’s a long list, commissar. Cotard’s, Anton’s, Damascus disease. Just for starters.” He hadn’t said blindsight. “What was it like?” I asked. “Like?” Although he knew exactly what I meant. “Did your arm 
 move by itself? When it reached for that battery?” “Oh. Nah. You’re still in control, you just—you get a feeling, is all. A sense of where to reach. One part of the brain playing charades with another, eh?”

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“Yeah, people keep saying that. Can’t trust the machines. Luddites love to go on about computer malfunctions, and how many accidental wars we might have prevented because a Human had the final say. But funny thing, commissar; nobody talks about how many intentional wars got started for the same reason. You’re still writing those postcards to posterity?”

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Predators run for their dinner, it goes. Prey run for their lives. The moral is supposed to be that on average, the hunted escape the hunters because they’re more motivated. Maybe that was true when it all just came down to who ran faster. Doesn’t seem to hold when the strategy involves tactical foresight and double-reverse mind fucks, though. The vampires win every time.

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IF YOU CAN SEE IT, CHANCES ARE IT DOESN’T EXIST. —Kate Keogh, Grounds for Suicide

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MOTHERS ARE FONDER THAN FATHERS OF THEIR CHILDREN BECAUSE THEY ARE MORE CERTAIN THEY ARE THEIR OWN. —Aristotle

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Because Heaven had a catch. No matter how many constructs and avatars Helen built in there, no matter how many empty vessels sang her praises or commiserated over the injustices she’d suffered, when it came right down to it she was only talking to herself. There were other realities over which she had no control, other people who didn’t play by her rules—and if they thought of Helen at all, they thought as they damn well pleased. She could go the rest of her life without ever meeting any of them. But she knew they were out there, and it drove her crazy. Taking my leave of Heaven, it occurred to me that omnipotent though she was, there was only one way my mother would ever be truly happy in her own personal creation. The rest of creation would have to go.

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THE LORD WILL TAKE CONTROL OF YOU. YOU WILL DANCE AND SHOUT AND BECOME A DIFFERENT PERSON. —1 Samuel 10:6

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Alter carried baggage over a century old, ConSensus told me. Sascha was right; there’d been a time when MCC was MPD, a disorder rather than a complex, and it had never been induced deliberately. According to the experts of that time, multiple personalities arose spontaneously from unimaginable cauldrons of abuse—fragmentary personae offered up to suffer rapes and beatings while the child behind took to some unknowable sanctuary in the folds of the brain. It was both survival strategy and ritual self-sacrifice: powerless souls hacking themselves to pieces, offering up quivering chunks of self in the desperate hope that the vengeful gods called Mom or Dad might not be insatiable. None of it had been real, as it turned out. Or at least, none of it had been confirmed. The experts of the day had been little more than witch doctors dancing through improvised rituals: meandering free-form interviews full of leading questions and nonverbal cues, scavenger hunts through regurgitated childhoods. Sometimes a shot of lithium or haloperidol when the beads and rattles didn’t work. The technology to map minds was barely off the ground; the technology to edit them was years away. So the therapists and psychiatrists poked at their victims and invented names for things they didn’t understand, and argued over the shrines of Freud and Klein and the old Astrologers, doing their very best to sound like practitioners of Science. Inevitably, it was Science that turned them all into roadkill; MPD was a half-forgotten fad even before the advent of synaptic rewiring. But alter was a word from that time, and its resonance had persisted. Among those who remembered the tale, alter was codespeak for betrayal and Human sacrifice. Alter meant cannon fodder.

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As far as Earth was concerned, everyone on Theseus was an alter.

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Even when the walls didn’t move, they did: always at the corner of the eye, that sense of crawling motion. Always at the back of the mind, the sense of being watched, the dread certainty of malign and alien observers just out of sight. More than once I turned, expecting to catch one of those phantoms in the open. All I ever saw was a half-blind grunt floating down the passageway, or a wide-eyed and jittery crewmate returning my stare. And the walls of some glistening black lava tube with a hundred embedded eyes, all snapped shut just the instant before. Our lights pushed the darkness back perhaps twenty meters in either direction; beyond, mist and shadows seethed. And the sounds—Rorschach creaked around us like some ancient wooden hull trapped in pack ice. Electricity hissed like rattlesnakes.

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The wall glistened in my headlamp like wet clay. Satanic runes sparkled in my imagination.

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We stuffed the Gang into the tent. Bates moved aside as I dove in after them. Amazing, the way she held it together. Somehow she kept the demons at bay, herded us to shelter like a border collie in a thunderstorm. She was— She wasn’t following us in. She wasn’t even there. I turned to see her body floating outside the tent, one gloved hand grasping the edge of the flap; but even under all those layers of Kapton and Chromel and polycarbonate, even behind the distorted half-reflections on her faceplate, I could tell that something was missing. All her surfaces had just disappeared. This couldn’t be Amanda Bates. The thing before me had no more topology than a mannequin.

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She could hotwire happiness in the time it took to fix a sandwich, reconcile you with your whole childhood in the course of a lunch hour or three.

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“Let me give you the gift of happiness,” she said. “I’m already pretty happy.” “I’ll make you happier. A TAT, on me.” “Tat?” “Transient Attitudinal Tweak. I’ve still got privileges at Sax.” “I’ve been tweaked plenty. Change one more synapse and I might turn into someone else.” “That’s ridiculous and you know it. Or every experience you had would turn you into a different person.” I thought about that. “Maybe it does.”

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“So we’re fishing for what, exactly? Repressed memories?” “No such thing.” She grinned in toothy reassurance. “There are only memories we choose to ignore, or kinda think around, if you know what I mean.” “I thought this was the gift of happiness. Why—” She laid a fingertip across my lips. “Believe it or not, Cyggers, people sometimes choose to ignore even good memories. Like, say, if they enjoyed something they didn’t think they should. Or”—she kissed my forehead—“if they don’t think they deserve to be happy.” “So we’re going for—” “Potluck. You can never tell till you get a bite. Close your eyes.”

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BondfastTM Formula IV ÎŒ-OPIOID RECEPTOR PROMOTERS/MATERNAL RESPONSE STIMULANT “Strengthening ties between Mother and Child since 2042.”

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“Yeah? And how are you going to stop me, you little geek? You can’t even make the time to find out what’s going on in your own family; you think you can control me all the way from fucking orbit? You think—” Suddenly, nothing came from the living room but soft choking sounds. I peeked around the corner. My father had Helen by the throat. “I think,” he growled, “that I can stop you from doing anything to Siri ever again, if I have to. And I think you know that.” And then she saw me. And then he did. And my father took his hand from around my mother’s neck, and his face was utterly unreadable. But there was no mistaking the triumph on hers.

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She put her arms around me, drew me close. She smelled like sand, and sweat. I loved the way she smelled. For a while, I could feel a little bit safe. For a while I could feel like the bottom wasn’t going to drop out at any moment. Somehow, when I was with Chelsea, I mattered.

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PREDATORS RUN FOR THEIR DINNER. PREY RUN FOR THEIR LIVES. —Old Ecologist’s Proverb

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“You reached for it. You almost caught it. That wasn’t blind chance.” “Not blind chance. Blindsight. Amanda? Respond, please.” “Blindsight?” “Nothing wrong with the receptors,” he said distractedly. “Brain processes the image but it can’t access it. Brain stem takes over.” “Your brain stem can see but you can’t?”

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Something bumped the tent from the outside. Something grabbed the outer catch and pulled. Our shelter opened like an eye. Amanda Bates looked in at us through the exposed membrane. “I’m reading three point eight,” she said. “That’s tolerable, right?” Nobody moved. “Come on, people. Break’s over.”

id743209683

By the time we docked with Theseus both Michelle and I were feeling nauseous. (The rest of the Gang, oddly, was not; I had no idea how that was possible.) The others would be presenting the same symptoms within minutes. Without intervention we would all be vomiting our guts out for the following two days. Then the body would pretend to recover; for perhaps a week we would feel no pain and have no future. We would walk and talk and move like any living thing, and perhaps convince ourselves that we were immortal after all. Then we would collapse into ourselves, rotted from the inside out. We would bleed from our eyes and mouths and assholes, and if any god was merciful we would die before splitting open like rotten fruit.

id743209684

“That’s it! That’s it!” Susan cried. The triangles had iterated out of existence. Now the display was full of interlocking asymmetrical pentagrams, a spiderweb of fish scales. “Don’t tell us that’s random noise,” she said triumphantly. “No,” Szpindel said, “It’s a KlĂŒver constant.” “A—” “It’s a hallucination, Suze.”

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“Brain’s got all kinds of gauges. You can know you’re blind even when you’re not; you can know you can see, even when you’re blind. And yeah, you can know you don’t exist even when you do. It’s a long list, commissar. Cotard’s, Anton’s, Damascus disease. Just for starters.” He hadn’t said blindsight. “What was it like?” I asked. “Like?” Although he knew exactly what I meant. “Did your arm 
 move by itself? When it reached for that battery?” “Oh. Nah. You’re still in control, you just—you get a feeling, is all. A sense of where to reach. One part of the brain playing charades with another, eh?”

id743209686

“Yeah, people keep saying that. Can’t trust the machines. Luddites love to go on about computer malfunctions, and how many accidental wars we might have prevented because a Human had the final say. But funny thing, commissar; nobody talks about how many intentional wars got started for the same reason. You’re still writing those postcards to posterity?”

id743209687

Predators run for their dinner, it goes. Prey run for their lives. The moral is supposed to be that on average, the hunted escape the hunters because they’re more motivated. Maybe that was true when it all just came down to who ran faster. Doesn’t seem to hold when the strategy involves tactical foresight and double-reverse mind fucks, though. The vampires win every time.

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IF YOU CAN SEE IT, CHANCES ARE IT DOESN’T EXIST. —Kate Keogh, Grounds for Suicide

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We worked through it all, through fits and hallucinations and occasional convulsions. We tried to watch each other’s backs while magnetic tendrils tugged our inner ears and made us seasick. Sometimes we vomited into our helmets; then we’d just hang on, white-faced, sucking sour air through clenched teeth while the recyclers filtered chunks and blobs from our head-space. And we’d give silent thanks for the small mercy of nonstick, static-repellent faceplates.

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Every observation was contaminated by my own confounding presence in the mix. I did my best. I made no suggestions that might affect critical decisions. In the field I did what I was told to, and no more. I tried to be like one of Bates’s drones, a simple tool with no initiative and no influence on the group dynamic. I think I pulled it off, for the most part.

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I looked further and found God Itself in the meat of the brain, found the static that had sent Bates into rapture and Michelle into convulsions. I tracked Grey syndrome to its headwaters in the temporal lobe. I heard voices ranting in the brains of schizophrenics. I found cortical infarcts that inspired people to reject their own limbs, imagined the magnetic fields that must have acted in their stead when Cruncher tried to dismember himself. And off in some half-forgotten pesthole of twentieth-century case studies—filed under Cotard’s syndrome—I found Amanda Bates and others of her kind, their brains torqued into denial of the very self. “I used to have a heart,” one of them said listlessly from the archives. “Now I have something that beats in its place.” Another demanded to be buried, because his corpse was already stinking. There was more, a whole catalog of finely tuned dysfunctions that Rorschach had not yet inflicted on us. Somnambulism. Agnosias. Hemineglect. ConSensus served up a freak show to make any mind reel at its own fragility: a woman dying of thirst within easy reach of water, not because she couldn’t see the faucet but because she couldn’t recognize it. A man for whom the left side of the universe did not exist, who could neither perceive nor conceive of the left side of his body, of a room, of a line of text. A man for whom the very concept of leftness had become literally unthinkable. Sometimes we could conceive of things and still not see them, although they stood right before us. Skyscrapers appeared out of thin air, the person talking to us changed into someone else during a momentary distraction—and we didn’t notice. It wasn’t magic. It was barely even misdirection. They called it inattentional blindness, and it had been well-known for a century or more: a tendency for the eye to simply not notice things that evolutionary experience classed as unlikely. I found the opposite of Szpindel’s blindsight, a malady not in which the sighted believe they are blind but one in which the blind insist they can see. The very idea was absurd unto insanity and yet there they were, retinas detached, optic nerves burned away, any possibility of vision denied by the laws of physics: bumping into walls, tripping over furniture, inventing endless ludicrous explanations for their clumsiness. The lights, unexpectedly turned off by some other party. A colorful bird glimpsed through the window, distracting attention from the obstacle ahead. I can see perfectly well, thank you. Nothing wrong with my eyes. Gauges in the head, Szpindel had called them. But there were other things in there, too. There was a model of the world, and we didn’t look outward at all; our conscious selves saw only the simulation in our heads, an interpretation of reality, endlessly refreshed by input from the senses. What happens when those senses go dark, but the model—thrown off-kilter by some trauma or tumor—fails to refresh? How long do we stare in at that obsolete


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YOU HAVE EYES, BUT YOU DO NOT SEE. —Jesus the Nazorean

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“Maybe 
 can he be fixed?” “No. There’s brain damage.” There was something like sympathy in the vampire’s voice, the practiced affectation of an accomplished mimic. There was something else, too, an all-but-imperceptible hunger, a subtle edge of temptation. I don’t think anyone heard it but me. We were sick, and getting sicker. Predators are drawn to the weak and injured.

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It’s not so much that the bleeding edge lacks social skills; it’s just that once you get past a certain point, formal speech is too damn slow.

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Except for Susan James. The walking contradiction, the woman so devoted to Communication As Unifier that she’d cut her own brain into disunified chunks to make the point. She was the only one who ever seemed to care who she was talking to. The others spoke only for themselves, even when they spoke to each other. Even James’s other cores would speak their own minds in their own way, and let everyone else translate as best they could. It wasn’t a problem. Everyone on Theseus could read everyone else. But that didn’t matter to Susan James. She fit each of her words to their intended recipient, she accommodated. I am a conduit. I exist to bridge the gap, and I’d bridge nothing if I only told you what these people said. So I am telling you what they meant, and it will mean as much to you as you can handle. Except for Susan James, linguist and ringleader, whom I trust to speak for herself.

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Eight minutes to apogee. Sarasti pulled the plug. Down on Rorschach, our tent burst like a bug beneath a boot. A geyser erupted from the wound; a snowstorm swirled at its edges, its charged curlicues intricate as lace. Atmosphere gushed into vacuum, spread thin, crystallized. Briefly, the space around base camp sparkled. It was almost beautiful.

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MY GENES DONE GONE AND TRICKED MY BRAIN BY MAKING FUCKING FEEL SO GREAT THAT’S HOW THE LITTLE CREEPS ATTAIN THEIR PLAN TO FUCKIN’ REPLICATE BUT BRAIN’S GOT TRICKS ITSELF, YOU SEE TO GET THE BANG BUT NOT THE BITE I GOT THIS HERE VASECTOMY MY GENES CAN FUCK THEMSELVES TONIGHT. —The R-Selectors, “Trunclade”

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Vampire logic. From an obvious premise to an opaque conclusion. Our lives depended on it.

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We fell. Ridged spires and gnarled limbs sectioned the sky wherever I looked, cut the distant starscape and the imminent superJovian into a jagged mosaic veined in black. Three kilometers away or thirty, the tip of some swollen extremity burst in a silent explosion of charged particles, a distant fog of ruptured, freezing atmosphere. Even as it faded I could make out wisps and streamers swirling into complex spirals: Rorschach’s magnetic field, sculpting the artifact’s very breath into radioactive sleet. I’d never seen it with naked eyes before. I felt like an insect on a starry midwinter’s night, falling through the aftermath of a forest fire.

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Moments later a pinpoint sodium sun flared and died against the ebony landscape ahead—antimatter charge, so small you could almost count the atoms, shot directly into the hull. A lot rougher than the tentative foreplay of our first date.

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The lead grunt sprayed the fog with click trains and discovered that the tunnel widened into some kind of chamber seventeen meters farther along. Squinting in that direction I could just make out subterranean outlines through the mist. I could just make out jawed things, pulling back out of sight.

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Earlier generations had worshipped malign and capricious spirits. Ours put its faith in an ordered universe. Here in the Devil’s Baklava, it was easy to wonder if our ancestors hadn’t been closer to the mark.

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“There’s something in front of you, Keeton. Directly between you and the grunt. Can’t you see it?” “N-no. My HUD’s down—” Sascha broke in: “How can he not see it it’s right th—” Bates barked over her: “It’s man-sized, radially symmetrical, eight, nine arms. Like tentacles, but—segmented. Spiky.” “I don’t see anything,” I said. But I did: I saw something reaching for me, in my pod back aboard Theseus. I saw something curled up motionless in the ship’s spine, watching as we laid our best plans.

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The Gang barreled around the curve and now I almost could see something with my own eyes, flickering like heat lightning off to one side. It was large, and it was moving, but somehow my eyes just slid off every time they tried to get a fix. It’s not real, I thought, giddy with hysterical relief, it’s just another hallucination but then Bates sailed into view and it was right there, no flickering, no uncertainty, nothing but a collapsed probability wave and solid, undeniable mass. Exposed, it grabbed the nearest wall and scrambled over our heads, segmented arms flailing like whips. A sudden crackling buzz in the back of my head and it was drifting free again, charred and smoking. A stuttering click. The whine of machinery gearing down. Three grunts hovered in formation in the middle of the passageway. One faced the alien. I glimpsed the tip of some lethal proboscis sliding back into its sheath. Bates shut the grunt down before it had finished closing its mouth. Optical links and three sets of lungs filled my helmet with a roar of heavy breathing.

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He nodded. “It would be akin to independently controlling the movement of each individual hair on your head, although this creature is covered with little hairs from tip to tip. The same thing applies to the eyes. Hundred of thousands of eyes, all over the cuticle. Each one is barely more than a pinhole camera, but each is capable of independent focus and I’m guessing all the different inputs integrate somewhere up the line. The entire body acts like a single diffuse retina. In theory that gives it enormous visual acuity.” “A distributed telescope array,” Bates murmured. “A chromatophore underlies each eye—the pigment’s some kind of cryptochrome so it’s probably involved in vision, but it can also diffuse or contract through the local tissue. That implies dynamic pigment patterns, like a squid or a chameleon.”

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Because the scrambler was dead at our hands, no doubt about it. But it wasn’t an alien, not really. It wasn’t intelligent. It was just a blood cell with waldoes. It was dumb as a stick. And property damage is so much easier to live with than murder.

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PROBLEMS CANNOT BE SOLVED AT THE SAME LEVEL OF AWARENESS THAT CREATED THEM. —Albert Einstein

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“She’s just taking an interest. Not everyone considers childhood memories off-limits, you know.” “Thanks for the insight.” As if people had never taken an interest before. As if Helen hadn’t taken an interest when she went through my drawers and filtered my mail and followed me from room to room, asking the drapes and the furniture why I was always so sullen and withdrawn. She’d taken such an interest that she wouldn’t let me out the door until I confided in her. At twelve I’d been stupid enough to throw myself on her mercy: It’s personal, Mom. I’d just rather not talk about it. Then I’d made my escape into the bathroom when she demanded to know if it was trouble online, trouble at school, was it a girl, was it a—a boy, what was it and why couldn’t I just trust my own mother, don’t I know I can trust her with anything? I waited out the persistent knocking and the insistent concerned voice through the door and the final, grudging silence that followed. I waited until I was absolutely sure she’d gone away, I waited for five fucking hours before I came out and there she was, arms folded in the hall, eyes brimming with reproach and disappointment. That night she took the lock off the bathroom door because family should never shut each other out. Still taking an interest.

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It’s not a strategy, for God’s sake! Can’t you see I’m hurting? I’m on the fucking floor, Siri, I’m curled up in a ball because I’m hurting so much and all you can do is criticize my tactics? What do I have to do, slash my goddamn wrists? I’d shrugged and turned away. Nature’s trick.

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“Of course she wants you to tell her you only have eyes for her, you love her pores and her morning breath, and why stop at one tweak, how about ten. But that doesn’t mean she wants you to lie, you idiot. She wants all that stuff to be true. And 
 well, why can’t it be?” “It isn’t,” I said. “Jesus, Siri. People aren’t rational. You aren’t rational. We’re not thinking machines, we’re—we’re feeling machines that happen to think.” He took a breath, and another hit. “And you already know that, or you couldn’t do your job. Or at least”—he grimaced—“the system knows.” “The system.” Me and my protocols, he meant. My Chinese Room. I took a breath. “It doesn’t work with everyone, you know.” “So I’ve noticed. Can’t read systems you’re too entangled with, right? Observer effect.”

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You’ve reinvented empathy, almost from scratch, and in some ways—not all obvious, or I wouldn’t have to tell you this—but in some ways yours is better than the original. It’s why you’re so good at Synthesis.” I shook my head. “I just observe, that’s all. I watch what people do, and then I imagine what would make them do that.” “Sounds like empathy to me.” “It’s not. Empathy’s not so much about imagining how the other guy feels. It’s more about imagining how you’d feel in the same place, right?” Pag frowned. “So?” “So what if you don’t know how you’d feel?”

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GRUNTS LOOK THE ENEMY IN THE EYE. GRUNTS KNOW THE STAKES. GRUNTS KNOW THE PRICE OF POOR STRATEGY. WHAT DO THE GENERALS KNOW? OVERLAYS AND TACTICAL PLOTS. THE WHOLE CHAIN OF COMMAND IS UPSIDE-DOWN. —Kenneth Lubin, Zero Sum

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You’ve seen this kind of arrogance before, among your own kind. You had hoped that smarter creatures would be wiser ones. Bad enough to see such arrogant stupidity inflicted on the helpless, but to do it at these stakes beggars belief. Killing innocents is the least of the risks you’re running; you’re gambling with the fate of worlds, provoking conflict with a star faring technology whose sole offence was to take your picture without permission.

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“What I’m asking is, are they natural? Could they be constructs?” “Is a termite mound a construct? Beaver dam? Spaceship? Of course. Were they built by naturally evolved organisms, acting naturally? They were. So tell me how anything in the whole deep multiverse can ever be anything but natural?” I tried to keep the irritation out of my voice. “You know what I mean.” “It’s a meaningless question. Get your head out of the twentieth century.”

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“We’re all self-made. Nobody forced you to get the rewire.” “No, nobody forced me to get the rewire. I could have just let them cut out my brain and pack it into Heaven, couldn’t I? That’s the choice we have. We can be utterly useless, or we can try and compete against the vampires and the constructs and the AIs. And perhaps you could tell me how to do that without turning into a—an utter freak.”

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“Do what, exactly?” he said at last. “The enhancements?” Enhancements. As though he’d upgraded his wardrobe instead of ripping out his senses and grafting new ones into the wounds. I nodded. “It’s vital to keep current,” he said. “If you don’t reconfigure you can’t retrain. If you don’t retrain you’re obsolete inside a month, and then you’re not much good for anything except Heaven or dictation.”

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WHY SHOULD MAN EXPECT HIS PRAYER FOR MERCY TO BE HEARD BY WHAT IS ABOVE HIM WHEN HE SHOWS NO MERCY TO WHAT IS UNDER HIM? —Pierre Troubetzkoy

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it’s not so much that you don’t mean any of it. It’s more like you don’t know what any of it means.”

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But when I looked up again the butterfly was gone and so was she, taking all baggage with her. She carried doubt, and guilt for having led me on. She left believing that our incompatibility was no one’s fault, that she’d tried as hard as she could, even that I had under the tragic weight of all my issues. She left, and maybe she didn’t even blame me, and I never even knew who’d made that final decision.

id743799743

This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: You hurt it, and keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the speech from the screams.

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“A lot of biology doesn’t use genes. Sunflowers look the way they do because of purely physical buckling stress. You get Fibonacci sequences and golden ratios everywhere in nature, and there’s no gene that codes for them; it’s all just mechanical interactions. Take a developing embryo—the genes say start growing or stop growing, but the number of digits and vertebrae result from the mechanics of cells bumping against other cells. Those mitotic spindles I mentioned? Absolutely essential for replication in every eukaryotic cell, and they accrete like crystals without any genetic involvement. You’d be surprised how much of life is like that.” “But you still need genes,” Bates protested, walking around to join us. “Genes just establish the starting conditions to enable the process. The structure that proliferates afterwards doesn’t need specific instructions. It’s classic emergent complexity. We’ve known about it for over a century.” Another drag on the stick. “Or even longer. Darwin cited honeycomb way back in the eighteen hundreds.” “Honeycomb,” Bates repeated. “Perfect hexagonal tubes in a packed array. Bees are hardwired to lay them down, but how does an insect know enough geometry to lay down a precise hexagon? It doesn’t. It’s programmed to chew up wax and spit it out while turning on its axis, and that generates a circle. Put a bunch of bees on the same surface, chewing side-by-side, and the circles abut against each other—deform each other into hexagons, which just happen to be more efficient for close packing anyway.” Bates pounced: “But the bees are programmed. Genetically.” “You misunderstand. Scramblers are the honeycomb.” “Rorschach is the bees,” James murmured. Cunningham nodded. “Rorschach is the bees. And I don’t think Rorschach’s magnetic fields are counterintrusion mechanisms at all. I think they’re part of the life-support system. I think they mediate and regulate a good chunk of scrambler metabolism. What we’ve got back in the hold is a couple of creatures dragged out of their element and holding their breath. And they can’t hold it forever.”

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THAT WHICH DOES NOT KILL US, MAKES US STRANGER. —Trevor Goodchild

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“You can have blindtouch, and blindsmell, and blindhearing
” “That would be deafness.” She shook her head. “But it isn’t really, is it? Any more than blindsight is really blindness. Something in your head is still taking it all in. Something in the brain is still seeing, and hearing, even if you’re not—aware of it. Unless someone forces you to guess, or there’s some threat. You just get a really strong feeling you should move out of the way, and five seconds later a bus drives over the spot you were standing. You knew it was coming, somehow. You just don’t know how you knew.” “It’s wild,” I agreed. “These scramblers—they know the answers, Siri. They’re intelligent, we know they are. But it’s almost as though they don’t know they know, unless you hurt them. As if they’ve got blindsight spread over every sense.” I tried to imagine it: life without sensation, without any active awareness of one’s environment. I tried to imagine existing like that without going mad. “Do you think that’s possible?”

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Cunningham didn’t like to be played. No one does. But most people don’t think that’s what I’m doing. They don’t know how much their bodies betray when they close their mouths. When they speak aloud, it’s because they want to confide; when they don’t, they think they’re keeping their opinions to themselves. I watch them so closely, customize each word so that no system ever feels used—and yet for some reason, that didn’t work with Robert Cunningham. I think I was modeling the wrong system. Imagine you are a Synthesist. You deal in the behavior of systems at their surfaces, infer the machinery beneath from its reflections above. That is the secret of your success: You understand the system by understanding the boundaries that contain it. Now imagine you encounter someone who has ripped a hole in those boundaries and bled beyond them. Robert Cunningham’s flesh could not contain him. His duties pulled him beyond the meat sack; here in the Oort, his topology rambled all over the ship. That was true of all of us, to some extent; Bates and her drones, Sarasti and his limbic link—even the ConSensus inlays in our heads diffused us a bit, spread us just slightly beyond the confines of our own bodies. But Bates only ran her drones; she never inhabited them. The Gang of Four may have run multiple systems on a single motherboard, but each had its own distinct topology and they only surfaced one at a time. And Sarasti— Well, Sarasti was a whole different story, as it turned out. Cunningham didn’t just operate his remotes; he escaped into them, wore them like a secret identity to hide the feeble Human baseline within. He had sacrificed half of his neocortex for the chance to see X-rays and taste the shapes hiding in cell membranes, he had butchered one body to become a fleeting tenant of many. Pieces of him hid in the sensors and manipulators that lined the scramblers’ cages; I might have gleaned vital cues from every piece of equipment in the subdrum if I’d ever thought to look. Cunningham was a topological jigsaw like everyone else, but half his pieces were hidden in machinery. My model was incomplete. I don’t think he ever aspired to such a state. Looking back, I see radiant self-loathing on every remembered surface. But there in the waning years of the twenty-first century, the only alternative he could see was the life of a parasite. Cunningham merely chose the lesser evil. Now, even that was denied him. Sarasti’s orders had severed him from his own sensorium. He no longer felt the data in his gut; he had to interpret it, step by laborious step, through screens and graphs that reduced perception to flat empty shorthand. Here was a system traumatized by multiple amputations. Here was a system with its eyes and ears and tongue cut out, forced to stumble and feel its way around things it had once inhabited, right down in the bone. Suddenly there was nowhere else to hide, and all those far-flung pieces of Robert Cunningham tumbled back into his flesh where I


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Maybe my tricks didn’t work on Isaac, either, not really. Maybe he saw through my manipulations as easily as Cunningham did. But maybe he just didn’t care. Maybe I could read him because he let me. Which would mean—I can’t find another explanation that fits—that he just liked me, regardless. I think that might have made him a friend.

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IF I CAN BUT MAKE THE WORDS AWAKE THE FEELING. —Ian Anderson, Stand Up

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“Vision’s mostly a lie anyway,” he continued. “We don’t really see anything except a few hi-res degrees where the eye focuses. Everything else is just peripheral blur, just 
 light and motion. Motion draws the focus. And your eyes jiggle all the time, did you know that, Keeton? Saccades, they’re called. Blurs the image, the movement’s way too fast for the brain to integrate so your eye just 
 shuts down between pauses. It only grabs these isolated freeze-frames, but your brain edits out the blanks and stitches an 
 an illusion of continuity into your head.” He turned to face me. “And you know what’s really amazing? If something only moves during the gaps, your brain just 
 ignores it. It’s invisible.”

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Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors. If self-deception promotes fitness, the brain lies. Stops noticing—irrelevant things. Truth never matters. Only fitness. By now you don’t experience the world as it exists at all. You experience a simulation built from assumptions. Shortcuts. Lies. Whole species is agnosiac by default. Rorschach does nothing to you that you don’t already do to yourselves.”

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I still didn’t know the principles, the rules: all I had were examples. Last wills and testaments; the negotiation of jumpers with their would-be rescuers; diaries recovered from imploded submarines or lunar crash sites. Recorded memoirs and deathbed confessions rattling into flatline. Black-box transcripts of doomed spaceships and falling beanstalks, ending in fire and static. All of it relevant. None of it useful; none of it her.

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Ten thousand deathbed good-byes arrayed around me, a million more within reach. What was I supposed to do, pick one at random? Stitch them into some kind of composite? All these words had been for other people. Grafting them onto Chelsea would reduce them to clichĂ©s, to trite platitudes. To insults. “Want t’say, don’ feel bad. I know y’re just—’s’not your fault, I guess. You’d pick up if you could.” And say what? What do you say to someone who’s dying in fast-forward before your eyes? “Just keep trying t’connect, y’know. Can’t help m’self
” Although the essentials of this farewell are accurate, details from several deaths have been combined for dramatic purposes. “Please? Jus’—talk to me, Cyg
” More than anything, I wanted to. “Siri, I 
 just
” I’d spent all this time trying to figure out how. “Forget’t,” she said, and disconnected. I whispered something into the dead air. I don’t even remember what. I really wanted to talk to her. I just couldn’t find an algorithm that fit.

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YE SHALL KNOW THE TRUTH, AND THE TRUTH SHALL MAKE YOU MAD. —Aldous Huxley

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Even if we’d outgrown the need to stay quiet and hidden during the dark hours—the only predators left were those we’d brought back ourselves—the brain still needed time apart from the world outside. Experiences had to be catalogued and filed, midterm memories promoted to long-term ones, free radicals swept from their hiding places among the dendrites. We had only reduced the need for sleep, not eliminated it—and that incompressible residue of downtime seemed barely able to contain the dreams and phantoms left behind. They squirmed in my head like creatures in a draining tidal pool.

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Sarasti shook me. “Are you in there, Keeton?” My blood splattered across his face like rain. I babbled and cried. “Are you listening? Can you see?” And suddenly I could. Suddenly everything clicked into focus. Sarasti wasn’t talking at all. Sarasti didn’t even exist anymore. Nobody did. I was alone in a great spinning wheel surrounded by things that were made out of meat, things that moved all by themselves. Some of them were wrapped in pieces of cloth. Strange nonsensical sounds came from holes at their top ends, and there were other things up there, bumps and ridges and something like marbles or black buttons, wet and shiny and embedded in the slabs of meat. They glistened and jiggled and moved as if trying to escape. I didn’t understand the sounds the meat was making, but I heard a voice from somewhere. It was like God talking, and that I couldn’t help but understand. “Get out of your room, Keeton,” it hissed. “Stop transposing or interpolating or rotating or whatever it is you do. Just listen. For once in your goddamned life, understand something. Understand that your life depends on it. Are you listening, Keeton?” And I cannot tell you what it said. I can only tell you what I heard.

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You invest so much in it, don’t you? It’s what elevates you above the beasts of the field, it’s what makes you special. Homo sapiens, you call yourself. Wise Man. Do you even know what it is, this consciousness you cite in your own exaltation? Do you even know what it’s for? Maybe you think it gives you free will. Maybe you’ve forgotten that sleepwalkers converse, drive vehicles, commit crimes and clean up afterward, unconscious the whole time. Maybe nobody’s told you that even waking souls are only slaves in denial. Make a conscious choice. Decide to move your index finger. Too late! The electricity’s already halfway down your arm. Your body began to act a full half-second before your conscious self “chose” to, for the self chose nothing; something else set your body in motion, sent an executive summary—almost an afterthought—to the homunculus behind your eyes. That little man, that arrogant subroutine that thinks of itself as the person, mistakes correlation for causality: It reads the summary and it sees the hand move, and it thinks that one drove the other. But it’s not in charge. You’re not in charge. If free will even exists, it doesn’t share living space with the likes of you. Insight, then. Wisdom. The quest for knowledge, the derivation of theorems, science and technology and all those exclusively Human pursuits that must surely rest on a conscious foundation. Maybe that’s what sentience would be for—if scientific breakthroughs didn’t spring fully formed from the subconscious mind, manifest themselves in dreams, as full-blown insights after a deep night’s sleep. It’s the most basic rule of the stymied researcher: stop thinking about the problem. Do something else. It will come to you if you just stop being conscious of it. Every concert pianist knows that the surest way to ruin a performance is to be aware of what the fingers are doing. Every dancer and acrobat knows enough to let the mind go, let the body run itself. Every driver of any manual vehicle arrives at destinations with no recollection of the stops and turns and roads traveled in getting there. You are all sleepwalkers, whether climbing creative peaks or slogging through some mundane routine for the thousandth time. You are all sleepwalkers. Don’t even try to talk about the learning curve. Don’t bother citing the months of deliberate practice that precede the unconscious performance, or the years of study and experiment leading up to the gift-wrapped eureka moment. So what if your lessons are all learned consciously? Do you think that proves there’s no other way? Heuristic software’s been learning from experience for over a hundred years. Machines master chess, cars learn to drive themselves, statistical programs face problems and design the experiments to solve them and you think that the only path to learning leads through sentience? You’re Stone Age nomads, eking out some marginal existence on the veldt—denying even the possibility of agriculture, because hunting and


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Evolution has no foresight. Complex machinery develops its own agendas. Brains—cheat. Feedback loops evolve to promote stable heartbeats and then stumble upon the temptation of rhythm and music. The rush evoked by fractal imagery, the algorithms used for habitat selection, metastasize into art. Thrills that once had to be earned in increments of fitness can now be had from pointless introspection. Aesthetics rise unbidden from a trillion dopamine receptors, and the system moves beyond modeling the organism. It begins to model the very process of modeling. It consumes evermore computational resources, bogs itself down with endless recursion and irrelevant simulations. Like the


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The system weakens, slows. It takes so much longer now to perceive—to assess the input, mull it over, decide in the manner of cognitive beings. But when the flash flood crosses your path, when the lion leaps at you from the grasses, advanced self-awareness is an unaffordable indulgence. The brain stem does its best. It sees the danger, hijacks the body, reacts a hundred times faster than that fat old man sitting in the CEO’s office upstairs; but every generation it gets harder to work around this—this creaking neurological bureaucracy. I wastes energy and processing power, self-obsesses to the point of psychosis. Scramblers have no need of it, scramblers are more parsimonious. With simpler biochemistries, with smaller brains—deprived of tools, of their ship, even of parts of their own metabolism—they think rings around you. They hide their language in plain sight, even when you know what they’re saying. They turn your own cognition against itself. They travel between the stars. This is what intelligence can do, unhampered


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IF THE HUMAN BRAIN WERE SO SIMPLE THAT WE COULD UNDERSTAND IT, WE WOULD BE SO SIMPLE THAT WE


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“You have a naïve understanding of evolutionary processes. There’s no such thing as survival of the fittest. Survival of the most adequate, maybe. It doesn’t matter whether a solution’s optimal. All that matters is whether it beats the alternatives.”

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“It’s true,” Sarasti told her, “that your intellect makes up for your self-awareness to some extent. But you’re flightless birds on a remote island. You’re not so much successful as isolated from any real competition.”

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“Forget about minds,” he told her. “Say you’ve got a device designed to monitor—oh, cosmic rays, say. What happens when you turn its sensor around so it’s not pointing at the sky anymore, but at its own guts?” He answered himself before she could: “It does what it’s built to. It measures cosmic rays, even though it’s not looking at them anymore. It parses its own circuitry in terms of cosmic-ray metaphors, because those feel right, because they feel natural, because it can’t look at things any other way. But it’s the wrong metaphor. So the system misunderstands everything about itself. Maybe that’s not a grand and glorious evolutionary leap after all. Maybe it’s just a design flaw.”

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“We’re not talking about some kind of zombie lurching around with its arms stretched out, spouting mathematical theorems. A smart automaton would blend in. It would observe those around it, mimic their behavior, act just like everyone else. All the while completely unaware of what it was doing. Unaware even of its own existence.” “Why would it bother? What would motivate it?” “As long as you pull your hand away from an open flame, who cares whether you do it because it hurts or because some feedback algorithm says Withdraw if heat flux exceeds critical T? Natural selection doesn’t care about motives. If impersonating something increases fitness, then nature will select good impersonators over bad ones. Keep it up long enough and no conscious being would be able to pick your zombie out of a crowd.” Another silence; I could hear him chewing through it. “It’ll even be able to participate in a conversation like this one. It could write letters home, impersonate real Human feelings, without having the slightest awareness of its own existence.” “I dunno, Rob. It just seems—” “Oh, it might not be perfect. It might be a bit redundant, or resort to the occasional expository infodump. But even real people do that, don’t they?” “And eventually, there aren’t any real people left. Just robots pretending to give a shit.” “Perhaps. Depends on the population dynamics, among other things. But I’d guess that at least one thing an automaton lacks is empathy; if you can’t feel, you can’t really relate to something that does, even if you act as though you do. Which makes it interesting to note how many sociopaths show up in the world’s upper echelons, hmm? How ruthlessness and bottom-line self-interest are so lauded up in the stratosphere, while anyone showing those traits at ground level gets carted off into detention with the Realists. Almost as if society itself is being reshaped from the inside out.” “Oh, come on. Society was always pretty— Wait, you’re saying the world’s corporate elite are nonsentient?” “God, no. Not nearly. Maybe they’re just starting down that road. Like chimpanzees.” “Yeah, but sociopaths don’t blend in well.” “Maybe the ones that get diagnosed don’t, but by definition they’re the bottom of the class. The others are too smart to get caught, and real automatons would do even better. Besides, when you get powerful enough, you don’t need to act like other people. Other people start acting like you.”

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No system can fully understand itself.

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All of them, I began to realize, had missed the point. All those theories, all those drug dreams and experiments and models trying to prove what consciousness was: none to explain what it was good for. None needed: obviously, consciousness makes us what we are. It lets us see the beauty and the ugliness. It elevates us into the exalted realm of the spiritual. Oh, a few outsiders—Dawkins, Keogh, the occasional writer of hackwork fiction who barely achieved obscurity—wondered briefly at the why of it: why not soft computers, and no more? Why should nonsentient systems be inherently inferior? But they never really raised their voices above the crowd. The value of what we are was too trivially self-evident to ever call into serious question. Yet the questions persisted, in the minds of the laureates, in the angst of every horny fifteen-year-old on the planet. Am I nothing but sparking chemistry? Am I a magnet in the ether? I am more than my eyes, my ears, my tongue; I am the little thing behind those things, the thing looking out from inside. But who looks out from its eyes? What does it reduce to? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? What a stupid fucking question. I could have answered it in a second, if Sarasti hadn’t forced me to understand it first.

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NOT UNTIL WE ARE LOST DO WE BEGIN TO UNDERSTAND OURSELVES. —Henry David Thoreau

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“Give me a fucking break,” I snarled. That, too, had slipped out before I could stop it—and after that came the flood: “You put so much fucking stock in that. You and your empathy. And maybe I am just some kind of impostor but most people would swear I’d worn their very souls. I don’t need that shit, you don’t have to feel motives to deduce them, it’s better if you can’t, it keeps you—” “Dispassionate?” Cunningham smiled faintly. “Maybe your empathy’s just a comforting lie, you ever think of that? Maybe you think you know how the other person feels but you’re only feeling yourself, maybe you’re even worse than me. Or maybe we’re all just guessing. Maybe the only difference is that I don’t lie to myself about it.”

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“You figured it out. From Rorschach’s architecture, probably—form follows function, yes? Somehow you pieced together a fairly good idea of what a scrambler looked like before anyone ever laid eyes on them. Or at least”—he drew a breath; his cigarette flared like an LED—“part of you did. Some collection of unconscious modules working their asses off on your behalf. But they can’t show their work, can they? You don’t have conscious access to those levels. So one part of the brain tries to tell another any way it can. Passes notes under the table.” “Blindsight,” I murmured. You just get a feeling of where to reach 
 “More like schizophrenia, except you saw pictures instead of hearing voices. You saw pictures. And you still didn’t understand.”

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Imagine you’re a scrambler. Imagine you have intellect but no insight, agendas but no awareness. Your circuitry hums with strategies for survival and persistence, flexible, intelligent, even technological—but no other circuitry monitors it. You can think of anything, yet are conscious of nothing. You can’t imagine such a being, can you? The term being doesn’t even seem to apply, in some fundamental way you can’t quite put your finger on. Try. Imagine that you encounter a signal. It is structured, and dense with information. It meets all the criteria of an intelligent transmission. Evolution and experience offer a variety of paths to follow, branch points in the flowcharts that handle such input. Sometimes these signals come from conspecifics who have useful information to share, whose lives you’ll defend according to the rules of kin selection. Sometimes they come from competitors or predators or other inimical entities that must be avoided or destroyed; in those cases, the information may prove of significant tactical value. Some signals may even arise from entities that, while not kin, can still serve as allies or symbionts in mutually beneficial pursuits. You can derive appropriate responses for any of these eventualities, and many others. You decode the signals, and stumble: I had a great time. I really enjoyed him. Even if he cost twice as much as any other hooker in the dome— To fully appreciate Kesey’s Quartet— They hate us for our freedom— Pay attention, now— Understand. There are no meaningful translations for these terms. They are needlessly recursive. They contain no usable intelligence, yet they are structured intelligently; there is no chance they could have arisen by chance. The only explanation is that something has coded nonsense in a way that poses as a useful message; only after wasting time and effort does the deception becomes apparent. The signal functions to consume the resources of a recipient for zero payoff and reduced fitness. The signal is a virus. Viruses do not arise from kin, symbionts, or other allies. The signal is an attack. And it’s coming from right about there.

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“They’re not even hostile.” Not even capable of hostility. Just so profoundly alien that they couldn’t help but treat human language itself as a form of combat. How do you say We come in peace when the very words are an act of war?

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Because if Sarasti was right, scramblers were the norm: Evolution across the universe was nothing but the endless proliferation of automatic, organized complexity, a vast arid Turing machine full of self-replicating machinery forever unaware of its own existence. And we—we were the flukes and the fossils. We were the flightless birds lauding our own mastery over some remote island while serpents and carnivores washed up on our shores. Susan James could not bring herself to concede that point—because Susan James, her multiple lives built on the faith


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Proprioreceptive polyneuropathy, a case study I’d encountered in ConSensus back before Szpindel had died. This was what Pag had once compared me to; a man who had lost his mind. Only self-awareness remained. Deprived of the unconscious sense and subroutines he had always taken for granted, he’d had to focus on each and every step across the room. His body no longer knew where its limbs


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Rorschach’s mouths snapped shut at once, as though holding a deep breath. The artifact began to turn, ponderously, a continent changing course. It receded, slowly at first, picking up speed, turning tail and running. How odd, I thought. Maybe it’s more afraid than we are 
 But then Rorschach blew us a kiss. I saw it burst from deep within the forest, ethereal and incandescent. It shot across the heavens and splashed against the small of Theseus’s back, making a complete and utter fool of Amanda Bates. The skin of our ship flowed there, and opened like a mouth, and congealed in a soundless frozen scream.

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YOU CANNOT PREVENT AND PREPARE FOR WAR AT THE SAME TIME —Albert Einstein

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“We could engineer ourselves back into nonsentience, perhaps. Might improve our odds in the long run.” She looked at me, a rueful sort of half-smile at the corner of her mouth. “But I guess that wouldn’t be much of a win, would it? What’s the difference between being dead, and just not knowing you’re alive?”

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“I know your race and mine are never on the best of terms.” There was a cold smile in his voice if not on his face. “But I do only what you force me to. You rationalize, Keeton. You defend. You reject unpalatable truths, and if you can’t reject them outright you trivialize them. Incremental evidence is never enough for you. You hear rumors of holocaust; you dismiss them. You see evidence of genocide; you insist it can’t be so bad. Temperatures rise, glaciers melt—species die—and you blame sunspots and volcanoes. Everyone is like this, but you most of all. You and your Chinese Room. You turn incomprehension into mathematics, you reject the truth without even hearing it first.”

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U DISLKE ORDRS FRM MCHNES. HAPPIER THS WAY.

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SPECIES USED TO GO EXTINCT. NOW THEY GO ON HIATUS. —Deborah MacLennan, Tables of our Reconstruction

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If only I wouldn’t die in my sleep if I tried. But living bodies glitter with a lifetime’s accumulation of embedded radioisotopes, brilliant little shards that degrade cellular machinery at the molecular level.

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I can empathize with him, though. At long long last I can empathize with Sarasti, with all his extinct kind. Because we Humans were never meant to inherit the Earth. Vampires were. They must have been sentient to some degree, but that semi-aware dreamstate would have been a rudimentary thing next to our own self-obsession. They were weeding it out. It was just a phase. They were on their way. The thing is, Humans can look at crosses without going into convulsions. That’s evolution for you; one stupid linked mutation and the whole natural order falls apart, intelligence and self-awareness stuck in counterproductive lockstep for half a million years. I think I know what’s happening back on Earth, and though some might call it genocide it isn’t really. We did it to ourselves. You can’t blame predators for being predators. We were the ones who brought them back, after all. Why wouldn’t they reclaim their birthright? Not genocide. Just the righting of an ancient wrong.